LogInIts financial success was achieved through crunch, and now laid off employees are struggling.
Inside Out 2 arrived 9 years after the first part and was a huge success for Pixar, earning $1.6 billion in just 3 months. However, there is a darker side to the film. Perhaps Anxiety was added to the sequel for a reason.
IGN's new extensive report reveals an “unprecedented” crunch going on behind the scenes, with animators working every day for months.
“I think for a month or two, the animators were working seven days a week,” one source told the outlet. “Ridiculous amounts of production workers, just people being tossed into jobs they'd never really done before… It was horrendous.”
IGN spoke with 10 former Pixar workers and found out the details behind what one person called “the largest crunch in the studio’s history.”
Pixar
Earlier this year, Pixar faced a wave of layoffs, which cut 175 positions. “I would venture that at least 95% of the people that got laid off are financially f*cked right now,” one source told IGN. And this doesn't seem to be the end of job cuts for Pixar.
Some laid-off people were left without bonuses, ranging from one week to ten weeks’ pay, a very important part of work, as the company's rates are lower than most locally, so this promise of a bonus is vital for workers.
“It really crushed a lot of us,” one person said. “...When we were told the day we were laid off that it (the bonus) is only for active employees, I sobbed.”
Moreover, Pixar cut access to work materials and personal files for laid-off staff, leaving them feeling “blindsided.” Inside Out 2's success elicited various emotions from people who were asked to leave. “I was a fan before I worked there, so it's really hard to see how the sausage gets made now and be like, ‘Oh, can I ever just be a fan again?’ I don’t know.”
Pixar
Inside Out 2 was a long, emotional journey for the creators. There were several reasons for the crunch, and one of them was the failure of Lightyear, which brought Pixar $226.4 million only. Inside Out 2 had to reverse this disappointment, and some even think that if the movie had failed, it would have broken the studio.
“That was the pressure felt by everybody,” one person shared. “‘We need this movie to succeed because we won't have a studio [otherwise].’ And that is the pressure that everybody felt the whole time. The whole time. Even now, I think people are gone, still feeling that pressure of like, ‘Oh my God, we did it. We did it.’ “
Pixar
This focus on success meant no experiments and risks. Several sources told IGN that Disney leadership largely blamed Lightyear’s financial failure on the same-sex kiss in the movie, which was removed and then returned after an internal backlash.
“It is, as far as I know, still a thing, where leadership, they'll bring up Lightyear specifically and say, ‘Oh, Lightyear was a financial failure because it had a queer kiss in it,’” one employee said. “That's not the reason the movie failed.”
So the management, reportedly uncomfortable with LGBTQ themes, continuously asked to make Inside Out 2’s protagonist Riley “less gay,” which also added more work to employees' plates. They had to make sure Riley and Val had no “romantic chemistry” and were "just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight."
“Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay,” one source shared. “In the film, what you saw, nothing about Riley says that she is gay, but it is kind of inferred based on certain contexts. And so that is something that they tried to play down at multiple points.”
Pixar
All this pressure and extra work on the story caused the crunch, along with the new “Long and Lean” approach, which was supposed to give Pixar “a longer runway to finish a project, but with less staff.”
The studio's upcoming movie Elio seems to suffer from the same issues as Inside Out 2. It was delayed until June 2025, and while its Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter says it's due to the actors' strike, IGN's sources claim that part of the reason is major story changes.
“It was rushed work, paranoid work, paranoid leadership, mixed messaging,” one source recalled. “...You're just working 24/7. And so after awhile, your body just starts breaking down.”
The end of the strike started the crunch in full, which lasted until the end of Inside Out 2 production, with employees reportedly working on weekends for the last four months. Some blame the “mismanagement of the show” and a lot of “last-minute” changes.
Pixar
The work was also distributed unevenly: some employees were overwhelmed, while others had "nothing to do." As a result, visual effects artists sometimes had to start their shots before they were fully animated, which could mean their work would be discarded later.
On the bright side, workers were paid overtime and offered time off. “They do take care of us when we do have aches and pains,” one source said. “They throw everything at us to try to help. There's really great health benefits, mental health. So it's not like they're not trying and they're not offering things. But at the end of the day, I feel like the expectations and that ‘let's just crunch and get it done,’ but then it goes on for months and months, it’s not sustainable.”
Unfortunately, Pixar wants to apply this system to Elio as well, so we'll have to see if it will be as much of a hit as Inside Out 2 was.
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